Revolution at the Point of Production: An Interview with Mike Hamlin of DRUM and The League of Revolutionary Black Workers

Mike Hamlin was a central figure of the Black Power Movement that manifested in Detroit. He believed Black workers needed to be organized at the point of production for a successful revolution to occur. As such, Hamlin and other radicals formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and helped organize a wildcat strike at Dodge Main on May 2, 1968. As a result of the strike and increased organization and agitation, other revolutionary union movements, for example the Ford Revolutionary Union Movement (FRUM), began to emerge and struggle for economic and racial justice. The successful formation of revolutionary union movements at different work-places led to the formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The League was inspired by Third World anticolonial struggles and the theoretical work of Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, Frantz Fanon, and Fidel Castro.

The following interview took place outside of Mike Hamlin’s apartment in the summer of 2010 when we discussed the history and theory leading to the formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The interview details not only the emergence of the League, but how it differed ideologically and practically from the Black Panther Party and the tension with White leftists who thought the Black working class did not have revolutionary potential.

JACK TAYLOR:

Perhaps you could start with a general introduction about yourself and the role you played in the League?

MIKE HAMLIN:

OK, well I was born in Mississippi in 1935, which I maintain is hell on earth. I lived there till I was twelve. As with most people with a little intellect, at that time most Black people, especially Black men, you had to learn quick. I give my students [at Wayne State University] a list of about thirty Jim Crow rules and laws that described the restraints that were placed on Black people, primarily Black men at that time, and I grew up conscious of that. I saw my father and uncle and all the men in the community—the rural community, we were sharecroppers—adhere to that. They knew that one inch off the path could mean instant death. It was both State terror and vigilante terror that we lived with…. The first two years that I was eligible to go to school I didn’t. I babysat my little sister who was two years younger than me while my mother worked in the fields. I started school and I did well, mainly because I was motivated. I realized something was wrong and I did things to gain skills and knowledge.

By the time we left to come to Michigan, I was in the fifth grade. I lived in Ecorse, which is a suburb of Detroit. We moved here in August [1947]. On my first day of class the professor called on me and said I did something. And I said, “well, I didn’t aim to do it” and the whole class cracked up. That was a highly motivating factor. From that day, I studied and focused on English grammar and I became very good at it because I was so embarrassed. It was a great motivator. And I became a top scholar and athlete at my high school in basketball and football. I think I was fifth in the class. I was pursuing the American dream.

I had friends who were middle class. The man who taught me more than anyone was a year ahead of me. His father had graduated from Colgate University in 1923 and became a principal at a school in Raleigh, North Carolina. But when [Henry] Ford started offering five dollars [a day] to work, [his father] came here and got a job in the foundry. He brought his wife, who was a teacher from a middle-class family, an episcopal family as a matter of fact, from Boston. I was constantly at his house. [His father] was a very urbane, sophisticated man, but he worked in the foundry. I learned a lot from him. He taught me to play basketball and I...